Design Beautifully Frosty Text Effect

Today we are going to make a tutorial on frosty text effect. While it’s still cold and wintry outside, I thought it would be high time to supply some more wintry text effects for our readers.

So, begin with making a new canvas of any desired size, and for now please use plain white (#ffffff) background. Later on we will add a custom texture or picture to the background, but for now, it will be much easier for your to work and see all the effects against the white canvas.

Select the typing tool and using Arial Rounded MT Bold font, set to “sharp”, use very big letters, say over 100. For the purpose of the tutorial we used 115, however if you choose to download out PSD, you will see that our original canvas consists from letters with font size 195.

Type your word.

The main part of this Photoshop tutorial consists from precise application of the layer styles as we are going to work with custom designed curved, textures (default) and a lot of other features. Let’s begin and please try to follow us throughout the tutorial if you wish to achieve the same result.

Go to Layer >> Layer Styles, and start off with “Drop Shadow” options. Apply the settings as you see below. For the shadow here we used a very dark blue, almost black color: #003059. However, feel free to chose a different hue if you are going to work with a light background canvas afterward.

Switch the tab to Inner Shadow. For Inner shadow we used a gray-blue color #0a7eaf, which will nicely complement the overall wintry feel of this text. Please pay attention to the fact that we are using “Noise” here at 3%, to add to the grainy / snowy effect.

Switch to Outer Glow and apply a very dark outer glow effect, we used #0a1732 with 35% which gave us light yet dark outlined shade.

Working our way down (in Photoshop..), to Inner Glow settings. This one gives our text effect the feeling of light and reflection, yet this is not going to be a direct spotlight, rather a cold reflection as you are used to seeing when looking on ice. Also here please note that we have applied a 17%, very visible noise.